While K-Tel’s discography of pre-1985 compilations is deep and wide (and a confusing mess to wade through), it is a finite system. I’ve spent over a year sifting through it, adjusting and re-adjusting my search parameters, and trying to find a few promising grains of wheat among the massive volume of chaff. There have been times where I think I’ve hit a hard limit on discovering anything new and worthwhile, and will have to content myself with the lower tier stuff I marked down in the “maybe” section of my notebook wishlist.

And then I stumble across something like The Main Event.

The LP was released for the UK market in 1979, and it’s both astonishing and bewildering. The sleeve lacks anything resembling the label’s typical visual or written hype — just a modest title and some featured artists overlaid on a garish lens-flared-to-fuck shot of a soundstage. The copy I got (from a German seller) has some weird off-kilter lamination on the front of the sleeve that could either be from a less-than-meticulous industrial job or a previous owner’s preservation efforts. (The sleeves on UK K-Tel releases in that era tended to use a far flimsier cardboard stock than American albums got.)

In any case, there’s an aura of understatement about The Main Event‘s trade dress that feels at odds with what the package contains.

The tracklist offers a stellar mix of cuts pulled from the “respectable” (for lack of a better term) side of the punk and wave scene — the type of material one might suggest to a dubious yet receptive person when making the argument there was more to the scene than spitting, cussing, and three-chord agitprop chants.

Elvis Costello’s finest (in my non-fan’s opinion) jam is on there, along with a Costello-backed cut by Nick Lowe. Crossover sensation Blondie contributed a pair of offerings, as did teenybopper punkers Generation X, pub-pop fellow travelers Squeeze, and the ever eager to please Boomtown Rats. Scene-adjacent and precursor artists Patti Smith and Jonathan Richman are represented with their signature — and UK-charting — efforts, and the Class of 1977′s more sophisticated vanguard show up to add a little safe-for-radio edginess.

Tonally, The Main Event reminds me a lot of Virgin’s Fun, Filth, and Fury and Rhino’s DIY UK Punk/UK Pop compilations from the early 1990s. That’s not a bad place to be, at least to my ears, as those efforts were instrumental in shaping my tastes at a time when louder-faster aggro fare had begun to lost its savor. It’s not the mix I would’ve made to represent that particular moment (needs more Rezillos and Lene Lovich and Tubeway Army) but it’s still a consistently solid listen devoid of any mood-derailing clunkers. (Contrast that with the New Wave collection K-Tel released in Scandinavia the same year, where the highs were higher but the lows were utterly abysmal.)

It’s about as close as I’ve gotten to my concept of an ideal K-Tel compilation — consistently listenable, strongly evocative of a specific moment, and featuring stuff that I’d never think to include if I’d compiled it.

And if it happens to include the 1974 Beserkley single version of “Roadrunner,” even better.

Back when it was released as a single in the UK a hugely popular radio DJ called Tony Blackburn took against it, calling Costello a silly little man (though he still played the song).

When Costello appeared on the TV show Top Of The Pops to promote Radio, Radio he found that the presenter that week was Tony Blackburn, various radio DJs taking it in turn to present it.

Being a vindictive sort, Costello changed the line “The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools” to “The radio is in the hands of silly little fools” while more-or-less pointing in Blackburn’s direction.